About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

The Religion of Peace* (Unless You Draw Stuff We Don’t Like)

* Religion of peace my pasty white ass. The man has religious fatwas and a $100,000 bounty on his head — with a $50,000 bonus if his throat is slit like a slaughtered lamb — from the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq. Over a FUCKING DRAWING. How small and insecure is your faith in Allah that you must attack a fucking cartoonist? And if you’re one of the people that honestly believes Islam means peace (rather than “submission”, the real translation of the word), then why aren’t you doing something about the vicious fucks that are wrecking your already tattered reputation?

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

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$150,000 eh? For someone I don’t know? In a world where people get shot in the street because they gave a gang member a dirty look, or for wearing nice shoes, I can’t believe that this guy has survived through breakfast.

Believe it or not, George, it is possible to have faith and be a reasonable human being as well. I use faith as a philosophy, not as a hardline set of rules that dictate who I can and cannot be friends with. I want to be a better person in how I interact with others, and I want to learn serenity. To me, faith gives me a good part of that, and simple logic gives me the rest.

Jason’s tone in this article was not insulting. He’s not calling all Muslims anything offensive, but he is questioning the values of the extremist minority who rightfully deserve such scrutiny. And I agree, it is the responsibility of any religion to advocate against extremists groups amidst their numbers on behalf of their victims. Most Muslims do not support terrorism in any fashion, but at the same time they do not support efforts to eliminate terrorism either.

Christians also need to become more active in taking down hate groups, which are increasing in number, and hiding under the Aegis of being Christians. The Westboro Baptist Church springs to mind readily, and thankfully, many Christian churches have set aside their prejudices to stand with the victims of this church against their practices.

I don’t think I implied that being a person of faith makes one unreasonable. Rest assured I was only implying that I think the difference in YOUR reaction was unreasonable. I would not want anyone else to read too much into my comments. I don’t even think that you are an unreasonable person, just that in this particular case, you are reading your own bias into the posts. I would have you know I find your posts so far on this site refreshingly logical by comparison to the general tripe spewed by many other religionists.

In “This is a really big problem” I read much less generalizations of the Christian faith than I do in the last paragraph of this post. Note the “religion of peace my pasty white ass” remark seems to be a reference to the religion as a whole, while “This goes double for you idiots that are on your knees praying for relief from the oil disaster” seems to be singling out those particular asshats in your faith trying to pray away an oil spill.

I was merely pointing out that your sensitivities don’t seem to extend as far when your faith is not the subject of the criticism. In your first comment in the last thread you state “I can’t help but wonder why you constantly attack people of faith”, when what you really meant to say was “I can’t help but wonder why you constantly attack people of faith in my religion in particular”.

I therefor do not think I am reading anything unreasonable into your comment. You just don’t think a criticism of the Islamic faith is insulting, neither do I. I just go one step further and don’t find honest criticisms of any faith insulting. Que sera, sera.

Again, I didn’t find anything to be directly insulting to Muslims for being Muslims. To the religion itself, perhaps, but not to the people for following the beliefs. If he had said that all Muslims overreact, then I would step in and challenge that. Instead, he singled out one activist group and criticized them for their extremist actions. Perhaps someone else might take a more personal sting from other things that were said in this article, but on the same note, someone else might have taken offense to many of the other things said about Christians in other posts that I also ignored.

If Jason were to toss in a Blog about the WBC and it’s actions and ripped into their supposedly Christian values, I’d probably get some popcorn and cheer him on. And yes, I’m picking on the WBC, because one of the things that I do hold sacred is giving a family some peace during a time of mourning, such as at a funeral. The WBC actively protesting this sensitive time disgraces everything that I believe in. And what’s worse, they do this in the hopes that someone will overstep a law in resisting them, in order to sue that person. That’s what it is all about. Again, Money.

I don’t deny that things hit harder when they hit home, but I’m not about to claim to be a saint, either. Far from it.

O.K.
Let’s try this one more time….
If Jason had said that all people who pray are idiots, then you SHOULD step in and challenge that. In the thread that this conversation started in that is decidedly NOT what he said, yet you took issue with it because YOU read into it in a way that was not implied. I was just hoping that it was some PC knee-jerk reaction to someone not pussyfooting around cultural and religious sensitivities. When Jason later posts something that I would consider a more far-reaching and direct criticism of Islam, I sit back and excitedly wait for you to tear him a new one for questioning the very core of the Muslim belief system. But you don’t.

You also do not get the luxury of divorcing the religion from the people practicing it. “To the religion itself, perhaps, but not to the people for following the beliefs” seems to me to be a non-sequitur. A religion is nothing more than a set of beliefs; required is that people follow them to make it a religion. Generally a religion is called a myth or a fairy-tale if you divorce it from people and belief. If you directly mock a religion, you also MUST be mocking the believers FOR following the beliefs. You are not mocking THEM per se, but their choice to adhere to a silly, pointless, archaic practice.

As an aside, Jason or any one bashing the WBC would be as redundant as hosting a poll on whether you are for or against Hitler. I can’t speak directly for Jason, but you can feel free to count me among the people who find that particular brand of Christianity by degrees more worthy of ire than mainstream religiousity. That does not mean that any other stripe of Christianity is not deserving of criticism.

*sigh* I’m never going to get away from the office today at this rate…lol

Okay, let’s chop it into bits and analyze it as I interpreted, shall we?

“Religion of peace my pasty white ass.”
– a bit smarmy and low brow, but I’ve used much worse to describe much less, so it would be a tad hypocritical to get worked up over this. All religions generally start out claiming that they are about peace. Few have ever actually stood up to that ideal over time. Many of those have been decimated by the followers of others who make this claim.

“The man has religious fatwas and a $100,000 bounty on his head — with a $50,000 bonus if his throat is slit like a slaughtered lamb — from the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq.”
– clearly identifies that he is talking about a vocal and hostile minority, and still does not use the word “idiot”.

“Over a FUCKING DRAWING.”
– this is actually probably the most offensive part of this to me. This is a serious issue to Muslims. It would be like someone walking into your house during a family meal and calling your mother a slut. Most people would simply demand that you leave. Extremists would try to kill you.

“How small and insecure is your faith in Allah that you must attack a fucking cartoonist?”
– I personally took this to still be directed at the extremist group, and not all Muslims in general.

“And if you’re one of the people that honestly believes Islam means peace (rather than “submission”, the real translation of the word), then why aren’t you doing something about the vicious fucks that are wrecking your already tattered reputation?”
– and I responded to this by agreeing completely with this. If religious organizations allow the extremists to be the official poster children for their religions, then that is what the world will think of them. I agree with this because it applies to all major religions, not just the one on topic in this article.

On the flip side, it is the same role of scientists to peer review the work of others, to make sure that false data is not presented as scientific fact. This can be catastrophic, and there is still the same attempts at dodging blame and pointing fingers, but morality is left out of it because usually with science, there are records of exactly who dropped the ball.

NOW. While you’re dissecting this one and parsing it to find that I’m not saying all Muslims are hate-filled extremists, perhaps you could go back to the previous post, and parse THAT one, line by line, and find where I said all Christians are idiots? Bonus points if you can find the word Christian in the original post.

Yes, I’m being derisive to the people that follow the Hadith that says people who draw things will go to hell (and by extension, apparently, ESPECIALLY people who draw Muhammad). Yes, they are a small subsection of the group as a whole. And while I admittedly strongly disagree with anyone who postulates that their holy book tells them anything special about the universe and that said holy book takes priority over any of the objectively verifiable evidence that science collects and examines, and that group includes every single religious person in existence, there is a definite gradient here. One you recognize, Nightfallz, in your excoriation of the Westboro Baptists.

For the record, I would Falcon Punch one Mr. Fred Phelps in his shrivelled scrotum if he told me that his invisible deity disliked me for any trait I, or my friends or family, happened to have. And, since in their view everything from eating beef to supporting the government to considering gay people to be humans is apparently worthy of damnation, the chances are pretty damn good that if he opened his trap within earshot, he’d get some splash damage on my loved ones with his hate-filled word grenades. And he’d be getting the aforementioned sack-punching.

He’s probably a good person with good morals on a one-on-one basis. Or at least he was before he started spiralling down, down, down into the hate-filled literal interpretation of Leviticus.

[…] those cases, you can hopefully tell. Look back at that recent post on pictures of Muhammad and the attacks on Lars Vilks if you want to see venom. Or in the post about the oil spill if you want to see someone […]

[…] privacy concerns. No, no. There’s far bigger retardery afoot whenever you get Muslims that believe in the Hadith as canon and put them in positions to make batshit insane laws. Granted, after Pakistan blocked Facebook and […]

[…] a ludicrous and gross violation of human rights. We’re also protesting because some people have been attacked, or had to go into hiding, because they once drew a picture of a prophet who may or may not […]

[…] a ludicrous and gross violation of human rights. We’re also protesting because some people have been attacked, or had to go into hiding, because they once drew a picture of a prophet who may or may not […]

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